“Great game,” he said.
“It is,” Jesse said.
“Ever play?” Tony said.
“I did,” Jesse said.
“I did too,” Lincoln said. “And
I’ve never liked anything so
well again.”
“Well, excuse me,” Brianna said.
Tony smiled.
“Except you,” he said.
“You’re just saying that because you want coffee,” Brianna said,
and got up and went again to the kitchen.
Tony laughed before he turned to Jesse.
“So what can we do for you, Jesse? Okay if I call you
Jesse?”
“You bet,” Jesse said.
“Let’s wait until Mrs. Lincoln comes back.”
“Brianna,” Tony said. “Tony and
Brianna. We don’t stand on a lot
of formality here.”
Jesse nodded. He smiled to himself. Suit looked very large and uncomfortable in the fancy chair by the door. Brianna came back in with coffee on a small tea wagon. Good china. Good silver.
When they had settled back with their coffee, Jesse said,
“First, thanks for being so gracious. This is a routine investigation, we’ve cross-referenced a lot of data and now we just
have to boil it down by eliminating the people we’ve come up with.”
“Is it the killings?” Brianna said.
Even sitting across from her he could smell her perfume.
And heat, Jesse thought. I can
almost feel heat
from her.
“Yes, ma’am, it is,” Jesse said.
Jesse could see Suit, by the door out of sight of the Lincolns,
staring at Jesse.
“We’re trying to run down every
twenty-two-caliber firearm owned
by a resident of Paradise.”
“Ah,” Tony said and smiled.
“That’s it.”
Jesse nodded. He took a small notebook out of his jacket pocket
and opened it.
“You appear to own a twenty-two rifle,” he said, reading from
the notebook, “Marlin model nine-nine-five, semiauto with a seven-round magazine.”
“We do,” Tony said, and grinned at Jesse,
“if you know that, you
probably know that we have a permit.”
“I do,” Jesse said. “You also
bought two boxes of twenty-two
long ammunition for it.”
“Yep, got about a box and a half left. We got a country place in
the Berkshires and when we’re out there we like to plink vermin.”
Jesse nodded.
